Author: Spencer

When is it worth it to argue over definitions?

April 10, 2025
It’s almost always a waste of time debating definitions with people (“semantic debates”). Just stop for a moment to define terms or switch to using the other person's definition so you don’t talk past each other. Definitions can be whatever we want them to be, and most of the time the important thing is just that our definitions match closely enough so that we can communicate effectively. Attempts to argue about definitions usually are a fool’s errand. And yet... there are some situations...
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When are tariffs beneficial?

April 7, 2025
What is the point of tariffs, in general? Lots of countries have them, to at least a small degree. It's rarer that countries use them to a large degree. Why? My understanding is that there are four main reasons tariffs get put in place: (1) Special interests that benefit from tariffs lobby for them at the expense of everyone else. This is obviously a bad reason to have tariffs. (2) Sometimes countries have an interest in building out capabilities in very specific industries as part of ...
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Can you trust survey responses?

March 29, 2025
Self-reporting on surveys seems ridiculously unreliable. People can lie or may not pay attention. People misremember things. People often lack self-insight. And YET, self-reporting fairly often works remarkably well in measuring things. Here are some examples: (1) In a large study we ran, IQ (measured by performance on intelligence tasks) had a strong correlation with self-reported (remembered) performance on the math portion of the SAT exam (r=0.61, n=714), which most participants would hav...
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Is IQ Legitimate or B.S.?

March 25, 2025
Is the idea of IQ legit or total B.S.? With the replication crisis in social science, it's worth asking this since a number of major psychology findings didn't hold up under scrutiny. To find out, at Clearer Thinking, we ran a massive study. We tested thousands of people performing random subsets of 62 diverse cognitive tasks (vocab, math, logic, pattern recognition, reaction time, games, memorization, mental rotation, language learning, etc.) We successfully replicated a classic findi...
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Five types of people who spread misinformation

March 22, 2025
People often assume that public figures who spread false information are just “liars.” Still, I think it’s more accurate and useful to realize there are at least five distinct and important types of misinformation spreaders: 1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call “bullshitting” (as opposed to “lying”). Some well-known politicians fall into this camp. 2) P...
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Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions

February 13, 2025
Predictions of extinction are not like other predictions for at least two reasons: You can’t reason based on track record in the same way you can with normal predictions. The stakes are extremely high. Being wrong on normal predictions rarely matters as much. Why? Regarding point one, reasoning based on track record: Normally, a type of prediction being wrong again and again will lead you to dismiss that type of prediction. For instance, if every year (for some reason), experts...
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Educators Helping To Improve Rational Thinking

January 24, 2025
I've recently been thinking that there are 4 main categories of educators who are trying to correct bad thinking or help improve rational thinking and that 3 out of 4 of them are essential for improving critical thinking across society (whereas one type is probably harmful): Child education: those who aim to teach children "critical thinking," - which often (but not always) means teaching the basic thinking, logic, and analysis skills that the majority of adults eventually acquire one way o...
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Is magic “real”?

December 13, 2024
Is magic "real"? No, of course not - but also, yes, absolutely. Some people think that magic exists out there in the world. Many others think that magic doesn't exist at all. I believe that a more accurate view than both is that magic "exists" but only in the specific way that "redness" exists. Before I get into why I believe this, first let me explain what I mean by "magic." I don't mean magic as in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or even spells from Wiccan magic. I'm referring t...
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How heritable are human traits like personality, height, mental health, physical health, education, religiosity, and conservatism? (h^2 estimates)

June 12, 2024
Here's my attempt to compile the heritabilities (in the narrow sense of h^2) for many different interesting human traits. Before you read this, however, I recommend you read our piece on the Missing Heritability Problem, which provides important context for interpreting this information. Newer, genome-wide association studies tend to get substantially lower estimates for heritability than the twin study figures listed below, and it is still a debate in the field which approach to measuring h...
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